The Measure of Our Sorrows
by Nancy Brown
Summary: You can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved.


Characters: Jack, Ianto (team mentioned)  
Warnings: discussion of: suicide, depression, dismemberment, sexual assault  
Beta: **bookwormsarah**  
AN: What do you know? I did have a post-Countrycide story in me. Standalone.

* * *

Jack heard the water running.

The plumbing had been installed piecemeal over the years, Victorian yielding to modern only reluctantly. The pipes knocked and rattled beside his office when someone ran the showers. For twenty years, he'd thought a series of heads of Torchwood Cardiff were partially psychic, knowing when he was back from a mission. It wasn't until he'd had Edwina splayed out on this very desk that he'd been present to hear the noise, and he'd managed to ruin an otherwise enjoyable night by spluttering at the wrong moment, "What the hell was _that_?"

Edwina was long gone. The pipes were still here. Jack, unfortunately, was also still here both in the figurative sense of waiting for a certain blue box and in the literal sense of how he should have ducked out hours ago and found someone attractive and willing. Instead, he was putting the final touches on the report about the monsters of the Brecon Beacons and trying not to imagine what he would have found had he come to the team's rescue ten minutes later.

Also, water.

Everyone had been told to go home and stand down yesterday and today. Owen had checked out the other three, patched up their wounds, said they needed rest. Jack hadn't wanted the reminders around of how close he'd come to a repeat of New Years Eve 1999. A break was good for everyone. Apparently at least one person disagreed.

He grabbed his mug and wandered downstairs. "Now," he said as he approached, loudly enough to be heard over the running shower, "someone here is disobeying my orders. You should know this means I get to have a free show."

He waited out of sight for a moment, which would allow whoever it was to grab a towel. Jack tried to play fair sometimes.

"And now we … "

Jack walked into the shower room. Ianto stood there quietly, facing away from him. His clothes were hung up neatly, just jeans and a shirt. He stood in his vest and pants, the spray of the water beating on his legs. Jack could see the bruises in high relief, could see the white dressings highlighted under the thin cotton of his shirt.

The gun in his hand was of course quite easy to see.

* * *

Ianto had reasoned through this as logically as he could given the cocktail of painkillers Owen had shoved into his hand with a bottle of warm water. If he didn't answer his phone, Torchwood would eventually show up at his flat, and then they'd have to do a cover-up. Much simpler to finish boxing up the few things he'd unpacked, to label everything for the storage locker, to go into the Hub where he could rely on being found. The water would rinse away most of the mess, and although someone would have to strip and move his body, he wouldn't make them travel across the city, merely up a level. He'd left on his underwear for one last stab at dignity. He didn't want to die naked.

He'd turned on the water, pleasantly warm on his sore legs. He'd been waiting for the energy to lift the gun to his head.

And now the Captain was here, and Ianto let out a half-sigh, half-sob, because he couldn't even commit suicide without neglecting some important detail, like checking to make sure the Hub was empty first.

"Hello, Ianto," Jack said in an infuriatingly calm voice. "Something you wanna talk about?"

He could still do it. He could shoot before Jack could stop him. He was so tired. "No."

"All right." He heard movement, and he tensed. Then he saw Jack move to step within his field of vision, out of reach for hands or shower spray. He held his stupid striped coffee mug.

Ianto had a crazy vision. After all this, he'd be remembered as the man who made the coffee. What a fucking legacy.

Jack took a drink and scowled. "Getting cold." He set the mug down on one of the benches that lined the walls.

Ianto let out a short laugh. He was allowed. He was going to die. "Sorry about that, sir. I'll get a new pot started."

"That's a good idea." Jack took a step closer. By instinct, Ianto's hand twitched on the gun, and Jack took that step back again. "It can wait."

"You should go upstairs, sir. The worst of the mess should be gone in about twenty minutes."

"Worked that out, did you?"

"Educated guess. I've been rinsing the bodies in here. More space to work."

"Ah." Jack glanced around. "I don't think I'm going to tell the others that. Gwen will freak out. Owen will just do his zombie impression again."

Ianto pictured both easily. "No doubt."

"Did you leave a note?"

"Sir?"

"I'm going to have to explain things to everyone when they come in tomorrow. If you left a note, that'll be easier."

"By the coffee machine."

"Considerate."

"I did try." He bit the words. This was ridiculous. "I also wrote a separate letter for my family, not mentioning this place. You'll want to approve it, obviously, but I think it'll answer their questions without compromising security." Rhiannon had known only the vaguest details about Lisa. She couldn't be told anything approaching the truth.

"I offered you Retcon."

He had. After Lisa, after everything, Jack had laid out Ianto's choices. "I don't want Retcon."

"But you do want to blow your brains out in my shower." Jack's voice was flat.

"I want it to be over."

Jack sat down on the bench beside his mug. He clasped his hands together. "You were doing better."

"And then I was almost chopped up. I can't do this anymore."

"Eaten."

"What?"

"I talked to the others. They were all worried about getting eaten."

A shudder started at Ianto's shoulders and moved down his legs. The villagers would have cut off his head, his hands, his arms and legs, would have carved him like a roast.

"Ianto?"

He surged with anger. "Are you going to sit there all night?"

"That's up to you."

"Going to try to talk me out of it?"

"Nope." Jack reached for his mug and drank the cold coffee. "Someone told me not so long ago that you can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved."

Ianto swallowed. He'd said that last week. Jack had been alone with his grief and his self-doubt about offering up a child to placate powerful entities who would have otherwise destroyed the world. A child, he'd said himself, who wanted to be that offering.

"You can't."

Jack nodded. "Again, so I was told. So I'm going to wait here. I'm going to watch you do whatever you intend to do, and I'm going to take your body to the morgue, and then I'm going to fill out the paperwork for loss of an agent. I've done this before."

There were rumours about Alex Hopkins and his team. What other deaths had never made it to London's ears, quiet suicides here in this very room by people who'd finally seen one misery too much? Or had more of them been like Suzie, making a mess on the Plass, which Ianto had been called in to clean before sunrise came with uncomfortable questions?

Ianto stood there quietly, the gentle patter of the water soothing in his ears. Jack wasn't going to stop him. All he had to do was lift the gun and this would all be over.

"Toshiko told me about what happened."

"Of course she did."

Before being sent home to recuperate, they'd each had to sit in front of Jack and give a verbal report of the incident. What did you do? How did you react? How were you captured? Were you sexually assaulted or otherwise injured? What alien species did you encounter, or if unknown, can you describe them to the best of your ability? Whose fault was this particular fuckup? Standard questions for a non-standard job.

"She said you tried to save her."

Tried. Failed. He said nothing.

"She said that she was threatened with rape before the planned murder." Jack was clinical, detached. Ianto remembered with perfect, terrible clarity the man groping Tosh, the disgust on her face, remembered willing her to endure it until they had an opening, any opening. But his memory was also clear on another image: Dr. Tanizaki grabbing Lisa's breasts, her body, and Ianto had dared not stop him although his own instincts shouted at him to protect her. From forever away, Jack said, "She said you gave her the chance to escape, putting your own life on the line."

She? Lisa hadn't escaped. No, Toshiko. Jack meant Toshiko.

"It didn't matter," Ianto said, not caring who he meant. "I couldn't save her."

"Sometimes you can't save the ones who do want to be saved, either." Jack took another drink of his coffee. He made a face and poured it out onto the tile, where the brown liquid merged with the water like blood before diluting away and down the drain. "Tosh is alive. She had a bad time of things, but it would have been worse if you hadn't acted. It's likely you'd both have been killed before I arrived if you hadn't given them the distraction."

Yes. Ianto could picture it clearly. His parts would have been chopped up, pieced out, ready for use: rump, breast, thigh, take your pick.

"Tell me about Canary Wharf."

Jack remained sitting on the bench. His hands rested on his thighs, language open, face listening. Ianto barely saw him.

"They had saws, shiny buzzsaws. Each victim was strapped down. They screamed." Ianto was right there, hearing them, smelling the blood, unable to look away, unable to run. "We were lined up, watching the ones in front of us. The later models were just soldered steel over the bodies while they drilled into their brains. The earlier ones were more complete. The hands and feet were left in piles off to the side."

"Ianto."

The screams were the worst. There was no mercy, nothing anyone could do. They'd been trapped. The Cybermen didn't care. As soon as the new robots were taken out of the conversion chamber, they'd turned around and grabbed the next person in line for chopping. Oh God.

"And then it stopped. The Cybermen were whisked away, and the machines stopped with the people still strapped inside. And they kept screaming. We were all … screaming. And no-one came."

The water had grown chilly when he wasn't paying attention, and the pipes moaned. He couldn't save anyone, couldn't save Lisa or Tosh or himself. He was a pathetic excuse for a man, standing in cold water in his underwear, unable even to shoot himself and quiet the screams once and for all.

"Ianto, I'm so sorry."

"Don't you fucking dare." He could deal with derision at his failure and his weakness. He couldn't deal with pity.

"I'm sorry I didn't come. I'm sorry I couldn't get there in time to save you. I'm sorry we came after everything was over instead of when it could have helped." There was a pain in his voice which didn't sound faked. Jack was so proud of being separate from One. Pride killed them all in the end.

"You'd have died with everyone else."

"Maybe." Jack watched him, his own face shadowed with sorrow. "I lost someone I loved in the battle, too. I wish I could have been there to save her."

Jack so rarely gave up pieces of himself. Ianto wondered which of the blank-faced automatons had been the woman Jack had loved, if she had been converted early, if she had taken the next person in line and strapped them down, or if she had been among the half-converted.

Another flash: UNIT had stalked the hallways, poking into each room. They'd looked for implants in the brains, asked questions of those still partially human, shot the ones who answered incorrectly. He'd dragged Lisa away barely in time. Had he left her there, held her hand as a merciful soldier put a bullet into her head, two people wouldn't have died. He'd never have come back to Torchwood, he wouldn't have been captured by cannibals, wouldn't have seen what was in the refrigerator, wouldn't have been there to break the nose of the man who hurt the only person who'd been kind to Ianto in months.

The water was stone-cold now, and Ianto shivered.

"I can't save you if you don't want to be saved, Ianto. I'm not sure I can save you if you do."

"I don't deserve to be saved."

"Who does?"

Jack stood from his bench. When Ianto didn't back away, he came closer, wrapping his hand around the one with the gun. Ianto let him take it. He expected Jack to pull him into a hug, but instead, Jack took three steps away, setting the gun down and retrieving a towel. He turned off the water and helped Ianto wrap up in the threadbare white terrycloth.

* * *

When Ianto was asleep in the camp bed, courtesy of his exhaustion as well as the extra painkillers Jack had dug up from Owen's stash, Jack climbed up to his office, closing the cover so the light wouldn't disturb Ianto's rest. Jack called Tosh to let her know that he was giving them an additional day off, that if she needed absolutely anything, she was to call him, and that he was proud of her. He called Owen with the same message, and as a courtesy, called Gwen's mobile even though he was certain he'd heard her trying to be quiet in the background while he spoke with Owen. He hadn't seen that coming. Maybe he should have.

Jack still hadn't finished the report on the cannibals.

He reread the words he'd put down, the scenario gleaned from his interviews with the others. Simple specifics - captured here, attempted to escape there, interrogation of fuckhead villager in this part - hid the hell written in their faces. He'd seen Suzie with that face at the end, seen Alex with it. Jack hadn't been able to save either one. He hadn't come in time to save his friends before Alex had gunned them down. He hadn't been there to save Rose, had to read her death on a list.

Jack closed the report. Then he puttered around the Hub, restless in the silence. He played a little fetch with Myfanwy, fed the inmates, made himself some tea, and finally climbed down the ladder to his bunker.

Ianto's eyes were open but glassy. "Jack?"

"Go back to sleep."

"Why'm I in your bed?"

Jack considered teasing him that they'd had lots of athletic and enthusiastic sex, but Ianto was too stoned. "You were tired."

"Oh."

"How are you feeling?" Other than numb and high as a kite.

Ianto held still for a long moment. "Cold."

Jack smiled. "That I can do something about." Still fully dressed, he pulled down the blanket and settled himself in snugly beside Ianto, drawing the covers over them both. Ianto watched him, head on the pillow. "Don't worry," Jack said. "I'll behave myself."

"M'not worried." Ianto closed his eyes again. In a few moments, his breathing went deep and even. He was safe for now from the demons that had nearly killed him tonight. Tomorrow wasn't so certain. One suicide attempt often led to more; in the morning, he might try to shoot himself again, or take the easier out of ODing on the painkillers. Plenty of the Torchwood dead in the morgue had found their ends like that, as well as too many who just stood still in front of a Weevil one night and waited. Even if Ianto didn't actively want to kill himself, he was going to have hard days ahead of him. Jack ought to find him a psychiatrist, ought to have Owen prescribe antidepressants, ought to fire Ianto and Retcon him and let him get the hell away from here while there was still a him left to go.

Jack knew he'd do none of those things.

In a low voice so as not to wake him, Jack told Ianto, "If you'll let me, if I can, I'll try to save you. I swear." He leaned over and placed a soft kiss on Ianto's forehead, sealing the promise.

In his sleep, Ianto's lips twitched into a smile.

* * *

The End


End file.
